Google Apologises for 2.6 Second Gmail Delays

Google's issued an apology and humble explanation for the tech issues that dogged Gmail for some yesterday, which varied in impact from triggering the odd error message to causing a small percentage of emails to take as long as two hours to get through.

For most people, though, Google suggests the problems were limited in scope, with the average email delay for those affected being a rather inconsequential 2.6 seconds. Here's Google's break down of its... breakdown:

Most messages were unaffected—71% of messages had no delay, and of the remaining 29%, the average delivery delay was just 2.6 seconds. However, about 1.5% of messages were delayed more than two hours. Users who attempted to download large attachments on affected messages encountered errors.

The ten hours of patchy Gmail coverage was attributed to a coincidental double failure of two unrelated network paths. [Google]